I was a huge Muppets fan when I was a kid. I mean, except for Miss Piggy; she was just a Muppety bitch. I would happily laugh my way through Pigs in Space, anything the Swedish Chef wanted to cook up, Beaker’s essential beakerness, and Animal’s drumming. Awesome stuff.

Point being: you’d have a hard time finding someone who wanted this year’s The Muppets to be a success.

It wasn’t.

To the ten-point

There are a few funny moments, but, boy, are they well-spaced through the movie.

The voices are wildly uneven. Fozzy and Miss Piggy, especially, seem to be wrong. It’s a somewhat forgivable sin, all things considered, but it is distracting at times.

Worse than the voices, by far, is the bad timing. Making people laugh is an amazingly hard job; delivery and timing are often more important than the jokes. The pacing is rough throughout.

That shouldn’t be used to let the writers off the hook, though. It simply doesn’t have that special spark of something that made the show so popular for so long. It just doesn’t connect.

I did enjoy the chicken’s take on CeeLo’s “Forget (ahem) You”…

…And the wide range of cameos.

I’m going to ignore the “evil oilman” plot not just because it was obvious, but because it was stupid. The re-introduction of the Muppets deserved something better than a lame clichè.

The whole thing lacked energy. Even Jack Black, typically a walking, talking advertisement against the dangers of speed, looked uninterested.